Hi all, among cryptographers in the embedded / IoT space, the 'MIRACL' brand has a lot of household name recognition. Most degreed cryptographers have used it in their research. Code from the open source library is in hardware from Intel, Microsoft, Google, Siemens, Gemalto, etc.
When we started the business around the MIRACL library, our intention was always to name the business MIRACL as well. As a small business its easier to managed a branded house vs house of brands. Unfortunately, we weren't as diligent as we should have been regarding trademarks, domain names, etc. It took us years to work out, but we did get EU, Japan and USA marks registered for MIRACL. So we had to use another name that didn't really have much to do with our business until all of trademarks and domains were assigned to us, which we can now assign to Apache. That's the history. To be clear, we're not looking for the same name as the Apache incubation project as our corporate name, i.e., Apache Miracl vs. Miracl Miracl. We just not sure what to call the incubation project and still inherent the brand recognition of MIRACL and not confuse people. The intention is that MIRACL (the company name) sells a supported crypto platform geared to cloud providers called Datacenter Cryptosystem. That's the product name. We'll also run (hopefully one of thousands of) community D-TAs and have dedicated D-TAs for paying customers, as we hope a lot of others will do so, as NTT has committed to. The open source platform for everyone is (at the moment) called OpenMiracl, a cryptosystem for cloud computing. Nick proposed thought this would be a good way to distinguish the open source offering from a closed source offering, we agreed. We're not really bothered with what to call it, we just wanted to make sure it inherited the MIRACL brand in some way. We've got thousands of crypto developers that have downloaded the MIRACL libraries over the years that we know will be very interested in platform, that was the reasoning behind the naming convention. To preserve the history, essentially. I apologise if we have stepped into it with the naming convention. I'm not sure why / how Couchbase / Apache CouchDB and Mesosphere / Apache Mesos have harmed the community or why they were bad mistakes, as had been mentioned previously, but we don't want to start off on the wrong foot. Any comments or suggestions would be most welcome. Brian On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 8:36 AM, Patrick Hilt <patrick.h...@miracl.com> wrote: > Hi! > Definitely interesting points to consider… I have just discussed this with > Brian (MIracl CEO) and he’ll post some comments back and we can take it > from there. > > Thanks for the input and support, > Patrick > > --- > Patrick Hilt > Chief Technology Officer > Certivox Ltd. > > > On Nov 10, 2015, at 9:53 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > On 11/10/15, 9:37 PM, "Nick Kew" <n...@apache.org> wrote: > > > >> On Wed, 2015-11-11 at 04:38 +0000, Alex Harui wrote: > >> > >>> In case it helps, when Adobe transferred the Flex trademark to the ASF, > >>> the ASF licensed use of the Flex trademark back to Adobe so Adobe could > >>> use Flex for its already-released versions and documentation. > >> > >> Aha, that's interesting. The suggestion was floated that our > >> project could be Apache MIRACL (sharing the name), but I > >> thought ASF wouldn't be happy with that. Overcautious? :) > > > > @trademarks would make the final ruling. Out in the wild, the terms > > “Apache Flex” and “Adobe Flex” are used to distinguish between the Apache > > versions and Adobe versions. The trademark “Flex” is now owned by the > > ASF. IIRC, one aspect of the license back to Adobe was that Adobe could > > not use it on newer versions, which was fine with Adobe since it was no > > longer going to provide new versions of Flex, it just need a way to > > reference the legacy versions since plenty of customers are still using > > and talking about these legacy versions. > > > > All Adobe website references to Flex (well, at least the prominent ones > we > > could easily find) had to be tweaked to indicate that Flex was now a > > trademark of the ASF. > > > > So a key question likely is: if there is something other than Apache > > MIRACL also being actively promoted, like a commercial version from a > > for-profit, then that would probably fail the “confusion” test and > > @trademarks would likely frown on it. > > > > I’m not sure the ASF allows new releases of commercial products to use > the > > trademark name, even with qualifiers like the company that produced it. > > IIRC, Subversion sort of has a “nickname” in “SVN” that commercial > > entities can use, but not “Subversion” itself. When Adobe brought the > > technology behind its PhoneGap product to the ASF, the project was given > a > > completely new name and then even renamed itself again to “Cordova”. > > Meanwhile, AIUI, Adobe ships new releases of PhoneGap with proper > > attribution to Cordova, but there is no "Adobe Cordova”. > > > > Of course, I could be wrong ;-) > > > > -Alex > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org > > For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org > >
